


Requiem for an Innocence

by daaarkknight (orphan_account)



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst and Tragedy, Bruce Wayne is Not Batman, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22017016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/daaarkknight
Summary: Bruce Wayne, maverick high school teacher at Gotham Heights, approaches each of his students as his life's magnum opus. But when he finds himself beaten back by the waves of every fresh case of depravity in his quest to help Gotham's troubled inner city youth, three boys put him back together...
Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Tim Drake & Damian Wayne
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40
Collections: Arrowverse, Batman, Batman Family Fics, Batman/Robin (Bruce/Dick), BatmanFanfiction, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson Week 2020, Favorite Batman Fics, Graysoncentric, batman orignal characters





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FabulaRasa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/gifts), [Mithen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/gifts), [Unpretty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unpretty/gifts), [LemonadeGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemonadeGarden/gifts).



His hands grip the steering wheel, so tight he is afraid the wheel is coming off with his fingers. His knuckles are red on white. The windshield wipers keep sweeping across his field of vision, and even though it's stopped raining, he doesn't turn them off. He's doing eighty on a residential street, but he has excellent reflexes. The trees rising in the distance, rain-foggy, are swept away. The shell-pink Neapolitan villas, swept away. A stray turd lies in the middle of the road, swept away. It was probably left there by a dead Dalmatian. Bruce can see it wagging its happy tail, doing its business before its swept away by a red monster truck. 

_Come on, baby. You can do it. You can. I'm not lying to you. I've never lied to you, Roy. Word to God, I'm not gonna start now. You can sit your ass down, each second at a time. It's just one second at a time, kay?_

_I swear, B, I can't. I_ can't!

 _Alright, hang on, just hang, I swear I'll be there, just hang on, okay Roy? Just...keep talking to me. I'm in my car, I swear I'll be there, just give me ten, you can hang on for ten more minutes, can't you my brave boy, my brave..._ _Roy?_

_Roy!_

_ROY!!!_

_Sorry, B. 'm slipping._

_'s okay, son. Just...keep..talking_

_Can't, B._

_Roy, what did they did give you? Did they give you anything? They must have...Roy!_

There's no answer

Bruce hung up and called the rehab facility. Turned out Roy had not been reacting well to the buprenorphine. Or at _all._ And some fool intern had put him on methadone. Without even knowing his drug history. Roy had used crack in spaces, when he wasn't using tar, and he would sometimes blank out for hours. He'd get up and not remember a thing. Not which dealer he'd used. Not if the stuff was pure. Not his own name.

Bruce is going to find that med school piece-of-vomit and lock him with himself in a closet. Then he isn't gonna stop. Not until his pants are brown and his shirt is red. Not until he is crying for his mommy and his dada.

Like Roy.

Roy had gotten hooked on the methadone. Then he broke out and raided the pharmacy. Then he ODed, his head slumped forward on his chest like a football, his eyes clear as glass. _Because I can't take it, B._ On the broken night that Bruce drove and drove and drove like a madman, only to hold his... _son_ to his chest, lying on the cold marble floor of the foyer, his head lolling forwards on his chest, his red tee soaked in sweat, his arm spread out in front of him, like he was reaching for something. For anything.

For Bruce.

And Bruce hadn't been there. 

Bruce pushed Roy's pink hair from his forehead. "Pink hair," Bruce had said after that very first day when he had had trooped in, blue water bottle clanging against the desks as he passed by, backpack alarmingly swollen, when after school was over and the bell was rung, and the kid with the water bottle and the hair still hadn't budged.. 

"I'll have you know I'm part Najavo."

"It's beautiful."

 _He's come so close to acing Spanish._ _I have to mark his papers._ Something in Bruce's gut tells him Roy has topped.

The sky, velvet deep, shines with thousands of luminescent homes outside the windswept glass. He used to show Roy the constellations. Big Dipper. Scorpio. Corona Borealis.

And Roy had grimaced. "Don't see em. Don' see any of em." 

"Maybe it's the Najavo in you," Bruce smiled. 

And Roy had laughed. Salmon hair thrown back, teeth white and sturdy, back in the days when it seemed like nothing could die. Behind that white picket fence, there was only life. 

"The bear. The snake. The council of chiefs," he had said as they sat on the track field, both blue in the moonlight.

"What?" Bruce asked.

"The constellations you showed me."

"Oh.

"Wow."

"You treat all your students so personally?"

Bruce smiles, strained. "You'd think a street-smart tough like you would know better than to meet with the language tutor after school at night."

Roy shrugs.

"Nothing worse than back home.

"And besides. Your eyes? They shine.

"Like diamonds. Real diamonds. Not the fake stuff."

"Roy." Bruce had said quietly, after some time. "Tell me. Tell me what goes on at home."

And it had taken several nights. But Roy had.

Bruce's lash starts watering with the glare of the azure dimlight. He's driving down a narrow ledge of road, snaking around giant cones of rock. He remembers. 

Roy, whispering one night, when they were working on his pregrade calculus.

"The soul would have no rainbows if the eyes had no tears."

Bruce had been stunned silence.

"It's something I heard. From the elders," Roy said, the corner of his lips tilting up in a half-smile.

"On the reservation?"

"No." 

But he wouldn't tell Bruce where.

_For each one you save, there's a hundred that die._

_There's some wisdom for you._

Bruce's tongue is bitter in his mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

"Bruce."

The bald man with the eagle's beak of a nose motions Bruce to sit. The only chair in front of the carved rosewood desk is round-seated and small for a man of his figure. The plastic covering crinkles as Bruce sits. 

He smiles. 

Oswald Cobblepot shudders involuntarily. Bruce's smile is something he can get away with. His face is an uncanny valley; between a perfect android's and a corpse's. This immediately puts him at an advantage.

"What is it." Bruce asks, with the bare minimum of hypocrisy.

Oswald scans Bruce's figure. He sits ramrod straight, hands placed perfectly on knees. The body is too well balanced, like there are sacks of invisible sand on either of his shoulders of the same exact weight. He's wearing a perfectly tailored turtleneck, which hugs his armpits and somehow streamlines his face.  
Oswald wonders how this simulacrum of a human being is the most sought-for summer school tutor on faculty. 

"There have been budget cuts. Again."

"I heard."

Oswald's nose twitches like it smells fish. He coughs discreetly, pulling out a silk handkerchief from his waistcoat. The man's antique mannerisms almost secretly amuse Bruce. He shifts his weight and folds one foot over his lap, still managing to remain completely straight.

"Your department is going to have to go."

Bruce's face is stone.

"But my department is externally funded."

"I'm sorry." Oswald coughs again, a modest, obsequious sound. He wipes his lips with the gold rim of his handkerchief and stuffs it into his pocket. Bruce watches the giant orb of a ruby on his finger with fascination.

"We're re-organizing. Your budget, which may I remind you, was donated by you to the _school_ , not to yourself, is needed."

"For what?"

"A new computer lab."

"But my department is helping children. Children from broken families. Children too old, too busy, too irregular. Children having special needs. All of which," Bruce rather tersely concludes, "you know."

"Yes, well. If you want to keep financing your--uh-- _department_ , as you so modestly call it, you'll have to pull out the old pocketbook."

So that's what it was. A cash grab. Blatant and insulting. 

"And what guarantee do I have that the school will not eat up my new budget when the next re organization comes around?"

"None at all, my dear fellow. That's why it's a good idea to be friends with city council members. A good old fashioned hand-polishing always sweetens the deal. But, of course." Here he sighs dramatically and looks slightly over-the-top. "You are too _above_ a little creative expenditure now-and-then, aren't you?"

"You mean bribery."

Oswald Cobblepot looks faintly embarrassed by the word. 

"Hardly, hardly. But, well--" he reaches inside his cabinet and pulls out his finest whiskey, ever out of reach to all seeking hands except those behind the table. He pours out an amber tumbler and pushes it across to Bruce.

"To good friends. And better acquaintances." He pours another out for himself.

Bruce methodically uncrosses his legs and gets up. He gives a slight bow.

"You must excuse me, Oswald. I don't drink before tea."

Oswald raises primly arched brows. "Suit yourself," he says with a huff. Bruce walks to the door.

"Oh and close that slowly, would you." He has a dim notion Bruce would try to slam it. But it closes without so much as a whisper.

Oswald Cobblepot picks up the crystal tumbler he had poured out for Bruce. It was really a shame that people like him could not look beyond to the ends for the means. He inhales, the smell of oak wafting into his nostrils, and sighs deeply.

It really _was_ a shame. 

********************

Dick Grayson rolls into the classroom, a mango smile on his face. Bruce wonders, for half a second if Dick is an imbecile as he takes his place right in front of Bruce, hardwoord to hardwood, all his innocence laid on his face. His parents had set the tent ablaze with cannon fire, but Dick still flew through hoops of fire and dream, until the day when he didn't have the heart to fly and jumped. But there was nothing to hold him. That was the same day his parents had mash-mush, red papaya and pumpkin pulp on the red and white on the circus tent. There was no one who had been spared. Six hundred people had worn Dick Grayson's parents that day. 

Bruce can never forget the day he heard Dick Grayson scream as his legs were taken out from under him, and his heart from inside his chest was ripped out and made confetti of. No child deserves to have to see their parents' death. But it takes a particularly cruel God who leaves nothing to see except pumpkin-and-papaya-pulp liberally splashed like entertainment. 

And now here was Dick Grayson, his imbecile smile on his face, his innocence on his sleeve, half his body taken from him, and the other half subjected to the regular tortures of those who thought he made for a nice, helpless victim lass, and were yet to meet the Dick Grayson brand of Confidence. 

Like the time in the boy's loo he'd rolled over a purposely-created puddle, his wheelchair sprawling, ejecting it's contents, Dick Grayson meeting floor, saying hello remember last time we met, wasn't that a fun show? and the jocks laughed their braying laughs and looked down at a boy they were not fit to lick the soles on whose feet, and felt only pity, no shame.

Bruce knows this because some guy, some wimpy starved conscience, who didn't have the heart to intervene when it mattered but didn't want to suffer his overburdened conscience told Bruce the whole story in babbling wheezes. And Bruce, that day, had done something he had never been proud of, except in that moment. He'd turned up the temperature valves when the jocks were taking their regular scrub-downs in the stalls, and for three seconds their head only been panicked shouts and red, raw skin-ouch and scorched screams.

Funny thing after that. Dick rolled up to him the following evening, when Bruce was packing in his late conscience, he sat in the doorway, his shadow frame leaping in front of Bruce lean and shivering, and he said "I don't need a hero. You got me?" and rolled away before Bruce could collect his breath. On that day Bruce had met his match, and then some. On that day he realized he loved simple, inane Dick Grayson. Too much.

"You okay?" Dick asked some days later.

Bruce didn't want to have to give him an answer to that. But Dick understood. He didn't want to talk about _it_ either.

The pink-haired boy was not showing and Bruce' eyes had dropped into some irretrievable pits. Bruce had told him he had transferred to another district. Except there had been small tears in his eyes and and he'd turned his back to the whiteboard so Dick should not witness the pain raw, but his frame had shaken like a doll, like Dick's had when he'd held the halved parents, and Dick knew. The pink-haired boy _was_ in another district, just not at school.

"It's okay," he had said simply. And it really was. No one feels the pain of loss when they're the ones lost. 

"How do you say that?" Bruce had been livid. A dark chaos moved in his eyes. "How do you _say_ that?"

Later, Dick had seen. The darkness was enveloping both of them. But _his_ darkness shone. Honey and pearls and dew glistened in his night sky. Bruce's was lusterless like a shroud.

So he put his head down and did his homework.

Now Dick places his hands down on his desk and fells the grains of wood, his hands enjoying the textures his legs were deprived of. Bruce looks at him steadily, then looks up when the rest of the room files in, purple pigtails and earphones and the faintly caustic smell of Adderall. And it's the start of a new day. Just like that. 

Bruce arranges the desks into circles, and passes out copies of the Stranger, his voice a mechanical monotone. But the kids are miraculously following along.

But for Bruce he is far away. He hears himself crack a joke about the ambiguity of socially constructed expectations. He watches his hands draw stick figures. He hears himself talk about differences in grief processing.

Dick raises his hand. Bruce says 'go'.

"Meursalt never had any feelings of grief." 

Bruce is not surprised Dick is the only one who picked up on this nuanced corollary of what he said. 

"How do you know?" 

"Because the novel _says_ he didn't. He isn't processing any grief, he's completely indifferent. He _accepts_ his indifference!" Dick spreads his hands in expostulation, his brow slightly furrowed. 

"That is his perspective." Bruce argues. "That's why I'm trying to show you to look beyond the novel for your narrative." The other kids are shifting in their seats. "We don't know where those buried emotions go but they _have_ to be somewhere, don't they?" Bruce's voice inflates upwards, almost plaintive.

At the desperation in his voice Dick quiets down, and Bruce is sorry. He never, ever likes to have the last word with his students. Just then the bell rings and it's all flurry and shuffling and hurried feet; the only still point in the classroom is Dick. He gives Bruce a look like he's trying to understand why he needs to believe everyone is hiding somewhere, deep down.

Bruce looks down and starts flipping through his notes.

He doesn't like what he sees in Dick's eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

Gotham Heights library: quiet, dark, claustrophobic. In other words: perfect. Bruce can be ensconced here for hours, the biblichor and fruity almond-like smell of musty cellulose wraps around him like a blanket. He sits in one of the old wooden chairs, poring over an old volume of Emerson, an glass of sherry at his elbow. Contentment tastes like caramel and nut. 

The pendant brass lamps glow with a dull gold two hundred years old, and as Bruce turns over another page, reciting with soft murmur, _Th_ _e world globes itself in a drop of dew, God appears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb, Everything in nature is made of one hidden stuff, Everything contains all_ his eyes float upwards and he sees a dim face in the air. A face of a boy, but with something _off_ about it. It's too dark to make out anything underneath it but the shape of a body. 

Bruce startles. But only for a bit: to an observer it would look like a tick of an eye. The face of the boy is not ghastly for its dimness. It swims forward, out of the shadows, its body taking form and semblance. Its face appears lit from the inside. It has a muted mouth, soft around the edges, and its lips are pink with youth, but have a bloom of unnatural fullness.

Bruce beckons the figure to come closer. He feels composed, placid, even. The placidity of a ridiculous dream one has accepted. 

The boy's body comes closer. Its eyes are kohl and cardamom, and there is a redness to their edges; its mouth opens like a fleshy gap in its face. It is ageless, and neatly dressed in a fashion from fifty years ago: perfectly tied shoelaces balance perfectly linked cuffs. It is short, but not short for its appearance. It looks at Bruce with an intensity that is scary for its fixedness. Bruce doesn't recognize the boy, and yet...he is dressed immaculately in school fashion--that is, for a private white-washed prep school, not the colorful Heights. He has the air of a person who wants to stare at another forever.

Bruce sits his spine back down without breaking eye contact. Their gazes are a serene meeting point of two lakes, tentative with first approach. The red rims around the specter's irises burst with specks of color. Bruce's turns his eyes down, and with his fingers turns over another brittle page, soft with dust. He ends up reading the words over and over, for his mind is still looking at the boy. Then the boy drifts down into the armchair opposite; he leans forward, his eyes intent on the page in front of Bruce, his mouth hovering an inch above. Bruce suddenly fancies, _what if he drools all over the leaf? What would I do?_

The boy continues to undisturbedly survey the page. His eyes form an empty respectfulness, the upside down words start shaping themselves in his mouth.

Soon Bruce grows at ease once again. He turns over the crinkling leaf, his heart beating at a pace considerably lower than its normal thump-thump of daily activity, resting in the nectar between dream and the cacophony of life's _pullings_. The boy grows restful too; he has stopped flickering his eyes over Bruce's, trying to read the emotion that lay waiting for him in the other.

They've accepted each other, Tim and Bruce.

* * *

It isn't long before the apparition starts appearing in other places too. At the water fountain. In a washroom stall. Everytime, it shows right between expectation and surprise. Once, when Bruce is walking to his car with a pile of fluttering papers and the wind pummels his papers and he tries to keep them, his keys slip out of his hand and fall on the hot tarmac of the parking lot. And it _\--he_ slides in to hand them to Bruce and slides away again. 

Bruce doesn't know what to think of these... _encounters_. Although maybe encounters is a rather macabre way, he supposes, of putting...what are probably harmless... _interactions,_ with a harmless boy.

A harmless boy _stalker_. 

So he doesn't think of anything. 

Then one day, Bruce and Dick sit in a rare quiet nook of the hodgepodge of the cafeteria together, munching on sticky french fries and what passes for the cafeteria's cheesesteak, biting into it with exaggerated eyerolls and grimaces, and making faces at each other's faces, (and no one looks at them because no one wants to hang out with the loser in the wheelchair who's best friends with the loser language tutor who's best friends with the loser in the wheelchair...)

And the apparition appears. It makes its way towards them directly, threading through the Asian kids with the rolling tummies and the iPads, and the purple punks with the joints discreetly puffed under tables. Bruce sees with the slim lateral window of his eye the long-legged, bent-on stride. He stirs the wisps of lemon into his crushed ice. A french fry hangs out of Dick's mouth, complete with mayo, and Bruce tries everything to tactfully hint at it before giving up and ripping it out as Dick expostulates to Bruce the finer points of robot hockey, which he insists is a thing. But Bruce's attention keeps getting riveted off. He peers straight out of the eye corner, all the while nodding very _presently_ to Dick's increasingly long-winded explanations of the robot penalty point system.

The... _boy's_ head is down and a soft Jersey cap is pulled low over it's--his eyes. It--he is _on_ them, making a beeline. He walks like he can't see any walls, his arms twisting in their sockets, hips swiveling sideways. Just before he enters their line of sight he swerves and ducks behind the coke fountain to the right. But Bruce has confirmed his suspicions. The familiar scarlet eye flash, the teeth too white for anything except a Crest 3D advertisement, the perfectly polished oxfords. It's _him._

Dick is now holding up his hands to represent rectangles (possibly to indicates goal-posts or jute boxes, Bruce is not sure on the details) and going on about the Southside Serpents and how they were bonker-est team in history, and Bruce was just about to open his mouth to make the stupidest, most obvious observation any English teacher could make to that adjective, which was very obviously dangled in front of him like bait. But something impels him to get up suddenly and follow. So he gets up, murmuring something he hopes sounds like apology. But he feels like every exciting moment in every book: the chase. He feels stupid. _You're in a cafeteria for godsakes, not some Amazonian rainforest._ But he needs to know.

Dick leaves his sentence and his sandwich halfway as Bruce slips into his black hoodie. The shadow behind the fountain is moving away. Bruce's limbs loosen and dangle as he pushes and jostle like any other kid, following the hood retreating through the crowd lining up and crowing in the square food court, under merciless skylight. The figure melts into and between tables, as if an invisibility cloak hangs heavy around its shoulders. No one notices the little red hood shrinking into itself in the midst of their talk and hand-swiping and tray clattering.

With surprising grace the boy rounds the row of bone-white benches and disappears behind the garbage bins, a ladybug. Bruce immediately feels the gangly grasshopper, too long and lean for its size, trying to sidle along. He comes round the bend and catches--but no, loses sight of the bobbing head _again_ in a sweaty, heaving crowd of yoga pants and sheened midriffs in the very center of the lunchroom, and ends up awkwardly stepping on some cheerleader's checkered toe. She moves aside with a roll of the eyes and a grimace, and he pushes forwards with a muttered word of apology. There are muffled giggles behind him. _Edge lord._ He has no idea what that term means, and that is with a Masters in English Lit. He begins to suspect his degree is growing obsolete.

He finally gets a view of his quarry scuttling out of the mess, and manages to get himself out, sweaty with liquid and salt. He looks around the foyer. The marble pillars stand stark and empty. The shiny corridors beam with a politeness and a how can I help you.

_Absolutely uselessly useless. So fucking useless._

He hears wheels behind him squeak.

 _Oh. Great_ _._ He puts off turning. Until, that is, he hears a polite cough, and then he _has_ to turn, because who doesn't turn at a polite cough? A monster, that's who.

So he turns. 

Dick's head is cocked curiously to one side like a spaniel. 

"Well?" Dick asks, and Bruce can almost see the almost-disappointed tail, still refusing to flag. His heart churns. He decides to look suitably blank.

After all, 'well' is an ambiguous starting point for any serious discussion. 

"You look like you've seen a ghost, man." Dick says, unbothered by any blankness, eyes not bothering to hide behind their nonchalance.

Bruce feels foolish trying to hide his solemn discomfort. He wipes the sweat beading on his neck. 

"It was nothing."

"You ran out on me, dude."

"Sorry."

Dick studies Bruce's face, the unease in the crowfeet of his eyes.

"Sure. Okay."

Bruce gets behind Dick's wheelchair and starts pushing him back. But Dick puts a hand over his, a tight squeeze. 

"Maybe it's better...if you go look for whatever you were searching for."

"It was nothing, Dick."

"Didn't look like nothing to me."

Bruce stops. His heartbeat picks up again.

"You...you're saying you saw it?"

"Don't know every kid in this school, but that sure was one hell of a creep."

_Creep._

Funny how the word brings back so many memories. Some of them good ones. Most...swallowed and taken care of. 

"And what about him spelled _creep_?" asks Bruce, voice smooth. 

"Uh...are you kidding me? Like, _everything_ , dude!"

Neither of them feel completely at ease. Dick doesn't know why he feels a gulf has opened, and they're on opposite sides. 

Bruce looks at his hands. 

"You know, there are kids here that call _you_ that too," he says softly. "Uncharitable ones." 

Dick looks down. His eyes cloud with fledgling memories, shards freshly planted, scar tissue barely formed. 

"Yeah," he says, in a voice of snowflake.

They're silent for a minute. 

"Yeah," Dick says again. "Stupid of me."

"Its cool, Dick. We all make those kinds of mistakes."

"No, that...that was real lousy of me. I mean, coming from the circus, I've always been the outsider, y'know? And now...now I fit someone else into that lousy box. That is one _hell_ of a lousy box."

"I know, kid." Bruce straightens his back. He looks at the chattering cafeteria, echoing with laughter, pulsing with rhythm and life. He looks at himself and Dick, standing on the brimskirts of it all, looking in. Studying it, like alien phenomena. _How does this happen? How do you..find your place? How do you not get trampled underfoot?_

The smell of banana chips and salami takes Bruce back to his glory days, when he was only marginally more socially functional than the boy with the oxfords and the teeth.

"He needs to belong," Bruce says.

"He's only looking for love."


	4. Chapter 4

It was a rich, wet day. The air was dripping from leaves, the sky was clouding over with grey. All of Gotham felt sticky and high alert. 

This was the day one Jason Peter Todd, high school dropout and rising street dealer, had chosen to carry an IWI Jericho 941 into the teacher's lounge and put a round into every teacher that didn't pass him.

This was every teacher on faculty.

Except Bruce. 

It was rumoured later that Todd had winked at that personage before packing up and hurrying out, leaving Bruce to call 911 and wade ankle-deep in wet red glop and vomit and periodic shrieks of _jesus shit my knee oh god oh fucking god the fuck! psycho got my leg it was that fucking kid insane knew he was a fucking retard shit fucking hell_ etc.

Bruce couldn't put his head on a pillow without smelling the rain and the sulphurous screams in the air, the rush of feet beating against floor, the scramble away from the death door, all the teachers falling over in a heap all cartoon, the art supplies flying into people's noses and eyes, all the sheets of rainbows and geometry drifting hither-thither, and fat, loud Mrs. Richardson's wail _I have children_ and her earrings slapping the sides of her thick jowls, and Jason cackling that 'yeah sweet? Well this'll give em something to bond over' before she was shot in the arse and toppled over to the floor in a heap like a sandcastle (she had rejected his science project, a live skeleton), and also stick-like M. N. Pharisee who fancied himself a DJ and shit all over Jason's heavy metal ambitions, who went down trying to sound the alarm, his ankle slipping in its own wetness, his head slumping into the wastepaper basket. 

Jason was found three days later, hiding out at a body farm. The newspapers had a field day. People were afraid inspiration would strike elsewhere. Even the mayor had commented, and the school attracted the best prosecutor. Jason was put away in juvie for the remainder of his, or what passed for his, childhood.

It was nice.

* * *

"Hey, Jay."

"Hey."

Jason is soft and triangular around the edges. His eyes are deep set, like a particularly shrewd frog. He has a likability about him that most people try to understand, but failing that, grow to detest. He has a sweet nature. He has a bad temper.

Most people put Jason in 'one of those categories', that they don't know the name of. Bruce knows the name. He's an eel. Slimy yet satisfying.

So it begins, the lesson-of-today. Jason had mentioned he would like to draw butterflies. So Bruce brings him color pencils and chalk (the former dulled by a surly security guard before being handed back to Bruce). They recite poetry for half an hour, then they eat blackberries, and do a bunch of other random shit. Bruce asks Jason how juvie is treating him, Jason looks at him like he's just asked how the moon was treating him. He remembers that for Jason, the mind was really an endless Narnia, and he was closer to being on the moon than he was to being in the beige-grey prison life he was fitted into along with the clockwork orange suit.

"There's this poem," Bruce says. "It's one of my favorites.

"It's called advice to a girl."

Jason laughs softly. 

"Yeah," Bruce says, biting back his typical self-deprecating smile. "Yeah. Was I a type."

"So," Jason asks, wiping his nose with his thumb. They're in the whipped-egg visiting room, complete with horizontal vibe. Everything goes sideways, from the clock to the ceiling beams to the glass wall eyes to the blank tables to the guards' stomachs. Coming in, you have the sudden urge to lie down.

"How's it go."

Bruce tells him. Jason's eyes drink in words like milk and snow. His eyelashes become word-heavy, his tongue grows slack and pink. When Bruce is finished, Jay relaxes back into the heavy metal slats of his chair, chest slightly heaving. He looks like he's wiped out after a particularly good orgasm.

Somebody watching them might think Bruce was actually giving him one. 

"Gaze into the depths of icy stone," Jason says with an expression of characteristic contumacy, his eyes far.

"Gaze into my depths, Bruce."

Bruce stirs. His unconsciousness suits him. The poem is meaning-heavy, and he doesn't want to lose himself in Jason's depths. 

"Am I worth having, Bruce?" Jason asks. His face is all dimple. Morning-creased. Happiness.

"Yes," Bruce says at last.

Jason is simple. And satisfied simply. 

While he is being led away by the guard, he glances back. _L_ _ay it on your hot cheek,_ he silently mouths.

 _Let it hide your tear,_ Bruce mouths back. 


	5. Chapter 5

It is the summer of new beginnings. Bruce gets Jason out on a hefty bail (and a little Cobblepotesque hand-polishing), for the first time feeling slightly evil and powerful. The boy squints in the sunshine and with a typical disregard for conventional thanks, turns on his toes and drives his nail into Bruce's chest. "Don't think this makes you own me."

His eyes blaze through Bruce, and Bruce has to give in.

They get in Bruce's roadster, and drive down the scenic route to nowhere in particular, the wind beating back against their hair. Bruce's jagged heart beats against his bloody chest, another ride from long ago coming back like a tidal wave. He turns to Jason.

"I don't want to change you. I don't want to make that mistake again. I tried, once. Anything you are, I'm on board. You understand me? I don't care who gets hurt, as long as it's not you. Just...keep the bloody doors open, okay? You might be surprised the things I'm ready to put up with."

"You're crazy." Jason grins. "You ain't like any adult I ever seen."

"Learned the hard way." Bruce settles back into the seat, it melts like butter. "There was this kid, once. Had a lot in common with you, actually. You would've gotten along. 'cept you _can't_ get along now. Because he's _gone_." 

Jason is fiddling with the knobs on the old chromium plated radio, and Keith Urban washes over them like an ocean _it's so black and white, he's stealing your thunder, baby blue ain't your color. If I were a painter I wouldn't change ya, I'd just paint you bright..._

"Don't want to hear about any of your kids." Jason says. "Don't care if he's dead babe. You're with me now." 

And Bruce feels a sudden somersault in his chest _._ Jason is watching him, and he slows the car down right over Gotham Bay, where the waves meet the seashore. He looks over at Jason, his pulse thick in his neck, his feet dry. 

"Jay. Jayboy." His face is serious, even though the sunshine is interfering. "I...I don't want you to get the wrong idea. We're...there's others. _Other_ boys. Other boys who're my responsibility, and whatever this is, it isn't... _that_. What you're thinking."

And Jason leans forward and examines Bruce's eyes, and whatever he sees in there fills him with rage and despair, and he throws himself, his whole body forwards, into Bruce, and mashes his lips into Bruce's, and keeps it there, his lips moving in soft, tired whispers against Bruce's hard, chapped lips and Bruce is so stunned and his brain whirsand Jason's lips are so sickly sweet and earthy and they smell of ocean and wind and car...

Bruce angles his back against the door handle, face away from Jason, a slight rawness of the lips, slight pinkness, parting. He licks his lips carefully, experimentally. He clears his throat and reaches for the water, still avoiding Jason's eyes. Jason turns away quickly. _Too late too late too late too fucking late you idiot why what made you think he was into you why why why_

Bruce knows what is coursing through him now.

Shame. A hollow pit of shame, filling quickly.

There's nothing to do now, but bridge the gap between them. Quickly.

"Jason," he says softly.

The boy has averted his face. But Bruce knows there are tears trickling down his stern, stubborn jaw.

Bruce turns Jason's face towards his. His eyes are shaky and grey, and quickly descending into that black night of chaos where Bruce wouldn't be able to read them anymore. His lower lip is on the verge of quivering, and oh! the eternal shame that would be, he would never let Bruce close, never let him near again, and right now he's so raw and vulnerable and pink and Bruce just wants to...

He pulls Jason into his arms and holds him against his chest, while the shaking stops and the sobs start to collect into heaves. And Jason has never cried in his life, although he doesn't know if that's because he's too sensitive and he was afraid once he started crying he would never stop...and no one had ever held him like this before...

So he sobs and pours his tears raindrops onto the white shirt that probably costs more than his whole wardrobe, and the white silk arms surround him, heavy and Bruce, and he doesn't know why he ends up in the same place he began and he knows he shouldn't be bawling his eyes out in the arms of the man he just tried to kiss 'cause all he did is busted him out of jail, and why'd gotten the wrong idea and he should just bury himself now and never look up at the sky, he should just bury himself in the cedarwood chest which he doesn't ever want to let go of, he just wants to wrap his hands tighter around the trunk and heal or die...

"Jason." Bruce says softly. "Jaybird. My Argonaut." His hair and face and voice are soothing and beautiful, like honey, like a gurgling stream, like...coming home. Jason feels his hair, being smoothed back by expert hands, a careful, gentle touch.

"I promise I'll be there. Maybe not that way, but every way I can."

His voice is a grounded breeze, true in every way, because from earth.

Jason slowly extricates himself and somehow finds the courage to look into Bruce's eyes. It may be the most courageous thing he's ever done. 

He sees in the blue of Bruce's eyes a promise, hidden under the lake. He knows what Bruce's promises are worth. 

So he brushes the tears from his eyes and sits back into the seat and turns towards the windy day. 

"'M hungry," he says, after a while.

Bruce starts the car.

"Let's get some burgers," he smiles.

* * *

Bruce remembers lots of things. 

As a norm he lives in his memory a great deal more than in his life.

There is the time, the day, or the night, when his mother had climbed the farthest tree to the topmost branch on a warm-cold wintry night, as he looked on. Her delicate body perched with a shawl, limber and slight, she had made her way like a hoopoe, hopping from branch to branch, from trick to trick. She wanted to reach the sky, mottled as it was with blue and black, like an ancient hooker. She had wanted to touch it, and come away with something on her hands. She wanted to show it to Bruce. What the sky was made of.

The air was smoky, and the sky was dense with misunderstandings, and the higher she climbed, the higher the wisps of clouds climbed after her, until she was submerged, was bathed in nothingness, and she was taken aback, shocked. Because it was nothing, it was all a dream, and she screamed back to her son _there's nothing up here, I can't reach it_ and it was dark and she was tired and some say she slipped, but Bruce knew the real story.

She had slipped. Because the sky had eaten her.

Eaten her right out, and spitted back out an empty shell.

It was nice. 

There are worse deaths. At least she had died doing something she had dreamed of. At least she had died reaching for the stars. 

And now every time Bruce looks at the stars, Martha Wayne winks back. 

Bruce smiles. 

* * *

It is when the stalker that passes for a boy climbs over Bruce's stall while he is taking a shit, that Bruce decides things have finally come to a pass.

Bruce is sitting on the seedy toilet seat (every toilet seat is seedy that doesn't have seat temperature controls), doing nothing in particular from waist-up, when he sees a familiar dark head pop up on the top of the partition. The rest of the body follows, all dangling arms and baggy pants dropping in right next to his naked thigh. On all fours.

Bruce is so taken aback he forgets to cover his modesty. His only thought is _why the heck is there no shower._

The boy straightens out, and stares fixedly at Bruce. It's the library stare. His face shows no signs he considers this an out-of-the-ordinary operation. 

"Listen," Bruce says gravely, injecting into his voice the greatest degree of gravelly authority it is possible to muster with pants around ankles. Then he stops. _What now? What is the protocol when someone climbs into your bathroom stall?_ The boy is standing right next to him, but mercifully out of sight of his... _thing._ It occurs to Bruce that the 'listen' was to no real purpose, given that the kid is the definition of all listen, no hear. He's wearing a Bruce Springsteen skull jacket with dangling hood. Apparently he's decided to dress his part too. His face is capricious, with small shifts in his eyebrows and mouth every few seconds. Like a mime, chronicling every expression, every mood of thought. 

Bruce officially can't take a shit when someone is watching, so he decides to call it a day. 

"Nooo fo-llow-ing in-side loooo," he spells out, very slowly. The kid, as expected, looks outraged at this condescension.

Bruce refuses to stand up while he is watching, so he waits for him to vacate the stall, that is feeling increasingly cramped and only wide enough for a quarter of its current inhabitants. 

The boy stubbornly crosses his arms.

Bruce sighs. He points to the TP roll behind his stalker, hanging on the dingy cream partition wall, with the God Hates You graffiti in thin stringy letters. "Could you...?"

The boy immediately turns and takes off the whole roll, before handing it to Bruce. Bruce looks at him pointedly for a while.

But of course, he is immune to all pointedness. _Jesus. Is it something in Gotham's water supply?_

"Look. I'm not cleaning myself with you watching. And the sooner I clean myself the sooner we get out of here, alright?"

Finally, the boy reluctantly turns and undoes the latch before slipping out. Bruce, gratefully and hurriedly puts himself together. Outside, he can see the immaculate oxfords tapping, tapping, tapping.

He breathes in, and mouths the words _lord give me strength_ before he opens the latch with a hitch in his breath, and steps outside the door. 


	6. Chapter 6

"Does it ever occur to you that I might actually _like_ to hang out with you?" Bruce asks, sliding out of the bathroom.

The kid cocks his head, his blue neon eyes flashing like a desolate road sign. His small chest rises and falls, his t shirt too big on his bones. 

Bruce shrinks down to his knees. They're standing in the rectangular corridor, the tube lights horizontal, running in straight parallel lines, white light beating down on white tile. Bruce tries to take the boy's hand, but he shrinks back from the contact as if Bruce's fingers are lightening-hot. 

"What's your name?" Bruce asks, eyes gentle, keeping his fingers to himself. 

The boy just stares. But Bruce notes the slight jump in his pupils. He understands. He just doesn't understand the need to speak. 

Bruce stands, looking down, not breaking eye contact. His irises contract and dilate, showing the boy he hasn't--and won't--forget about him the moment he turns his back on him. The boy responds to micro-expressions marvelously, with his whole body, trembling and shifting, hips swiveling to the angle of Bruce's body; there is a small tic in his left eye when Bruce smiles a small smile. Bruce's nervousness disappears. Realization reaches him like a peal of brilliant thunder. The boy reads body language as instinctively as people read speech. He knows what Bruce means. There's nothing to say. 

So Bruce turns on his heel and walks away with a small look over his shoulder.

That's all the encouragement the boy would need. 

* * *

_"You can't start a fire without a spark."_ Dick croons as Jason plays accompaniment on an air-guitar, swinging his hips, when they see Tim shyly approaching them, half-hidden behind Bruce, arm half-outreached to curl his hand around Bruce's.

"Is there a universe where Springsteen doesn't know the answer?" Jason smirks, leaning back against the locker, arms crossed.

Dick and Jason have bonded over a shared affection for the awkward kid who trails Bruce, the kid who doesn't know enough to put himself out there in a way that makes him presentable, the kid who no one spares a word for. The kid who's invisible.

"So is he, like, a student or summin'?" Dick had asked Bruce. Bruce looked around and shrugged. 

"His name?"

Bruce shrugged. 

"Doesn't matter," said Bruce. "When the time's right, he'll tell us."

Nothing mattered. 

The empty churchyard building, the streaming flyers, the abandoned lockers. The three boys roam around the ghost school while Bruce shleps the old files and records out of the building. It's squat, red, ugly and hugs the ground like a chunk of square brick poop. _Ghost school ghost school ghost school_ echoes throw themselves around in Bruce's head, like colourful mumbled-jumbled discarded words, discarded sentences, discarded years, discarded tears, discarded report cards. Am I doing the right thing? he asks. The building doesn't answer. Its green glass eyes are like thick film deposited over eons of turgid waste water, like solid sewage. And in that moment the magic happens, because _Roy_. Roy would have wanted him to, and he would, because the kid deserved the best, and he didn't deserve a teacher who had better things to do than putting him first. A teacher like Bruce had been. Who had tried to do right by everyone except the one who needed him most in that moment. He remembers Roy, sandals flapping behind him in the cold, tartan coat trashed round his arms. ringing the Manor doorbell--high, stone parapet, what had it taken on his part? to ring the door of that fairytale castle, and was Bruce the ogre?--cause he was hungry and it was cold, and Bruce had taken him and wiped him and cleaned him and warmed him and fed him and Roy had smiled, a real delightful smile, the sort of smile a person only smiles once in their life.

And then Bruce had seen the track marks. 

And Bruce smiles. Because _Roy_. Roy is the name of what he is trying to do, what he is trying to save. Every kid was Roy. And there could be no bad decisions. Because.

The worst decision had already been made.

* * *

Dick couldn't stay away, he had to see his home again. 

"I wish I could see it. It was a concrete thing. We carried it everywhere with us. It was real. As real as yours."

Bruce bows his head.

"And now I can't find it!" Dick yells. "I can't find it!" He curls up his fists into balls and pushes them into his eyes, wringing his tears out before they could fall out of his eyes.

"Do you see how beautiful the sunset is?" Bruce asks him. They're side by side, man to chair, boy to boy, shoulder to hip, standing at the bayside, tight air whipping at their nostrils, the salt literally floating into their eyelids, the slightly seaweedy smell of seagull guano assaulting them at every inhale. They're looking at the same sun. Its red and descending into a milky ocean; the beautiful water catches the light, every rippling wave throws a fresh swell into its surface, the mauve and orange snakes dancing on the surface in celestial fire. 

"How does that help?!" Dick screams. "I'm sorry," his head slumps down into his neck, and he curls his arms around himself, pulls himself tighter into his jumper, his shoulders shaking with his breath. Bruce would never understand. He would never _know_. 

What makes a home? Is it the people in it? Is it the love it is built with, the love in its walls and its doors and its panels, the love etched into every grain of wood? Is it some place to keep you warm, to hold you tight, forever and ever? Is it a place which lets you go? When you're ready, does it become your nest? _Fly, Robin, fly?_

Or is home love? Just...where you come back to, after a long, hard day of study and mental labor, the place you throw back and prop your feet up (and wasn't that funny? Just another thing he had lost _._ )

"Home is love. A place you carry with you. Inside your heart." Bruce says, pulling out Dick's letters to a T. Stringing out his thoughts out like washing. Trotting them out in a perfectly made sentence. 

"Fuck you!" Dick cries, and then promptly forgets all about his dignity and lets the tears flow, unmanly rivers of unmanliness. 

Bruce holds him through it, gentling his back, letting his face sob into his white tee (and Jesus. The guy must make an occupation out of this he's so good at it). Dick's face constricts and his tears sting, but they've got to pool out slowly because it feels like Dick could erupt like a volcano any second, and pour out all of his grief and revenge and hate into one angry sentence. 

But he doesn't know what that sentence is.

So he screams "fuck!" again. A few passersby look at them curiously, the boy in a wheelchair with the blue-and-grey checkered shawl and the man in the woolen overcoat with the limousine at his back bending down and patting his shoulder awkwardly, but this is Gotham (hello) so no one cares. A harried looking mother pulls her pigtailed daughter away to the other side. 

"I can't give you what you've lost," Bruce says. His voice comes out like a fairyland ripple. He is somewhat amazed himself at his tone, how effortlessly he shoulders Dick's burden, how he carries his _son_ through the land of suffering and anguish and pain and over to the other side, just by holding him, and telling him, pouring into him with everything he has, _we will make it._ Dick's head lolls onto his chest, exhausted from shrieks and cries and hoarse-throated sobs. His heaves die down, he falls asleep leaning on Bruce's broad, black chest. There are tear marks running down his cheeks. His hair is matted down onto his forehead, his eyes are closed in peaceful baby-sleep.

Bruce could paint him right now, just as he is: his eyelids soft and wet, his face flushed baby pink, one palm under his cheek; his lip petals vermilion, blooming in the half-smile of a gentle doze.

He would call it _Angel, sleeping._


	7. Chapter 7

Blue heavens shone down on the half-moon eyes of the little boy as he got up on bow-legged feet, stood up tottering, then sat down and cried and cried. Cried out to an empty heaven, to uncaring dunes, his...loneliness. The absence he could not understand, but could still feel. The missing--the lack. The warm arms, the soft skin, the mother's pliant kindness.

He stood up again, the blue moon taunting him with its aloofness, as he tried to stand. But his bottom plopped down repeatedly.

He let out a cry into the desert wind, like the mourn of a hoarse night owl. His voice was echoed to the stars, the skies draw his voice away, sending back nothing.

Then he stood up again. wobbling on unsteady feet, and placed one little toe in front of another, his body teetering on the precipice, but never slipping off the edge. His feet, small as they were, felt the movement, the power, in their walk.

And so he learned it was always better to keep moving, no matter how small the steps were, than standing still. He stepped his other foot half-forward, balancing precariously on the molten-silver sand, the soft grains slipping against his skin like rough silk. He let out a scream, just to hear his own voice, but it was not a half-sob like before.

It was a scream of triumph, of elation, of pride. The call of a jackal on the hunt when it catches up with its kill, when it's carving it up with its teeth. 

For Damian Wayne Al Ghul, full nine and half months old, had learned to walk. 

* * *

"Hurry up, father!" 

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

The temperamental boy who had entered his life, who had stood so self-assured, so confident of his place in it, who had proudly proclaimed his heritage, _I am your son, your only son, your legitimate son, I was conceived by the Lady Talia on your wedding night, I am your son_ , and Bruce had felt a certain wild joy at having so... _proud_ a son. His entire bearing, his entire posture, his face, said _I am proud to have descended from you. I am here to claim what is mine:_ you. You _are my father._

And Bruce had embraced him with open arms. Because he was a boy with no father, no mother, no legacy left, other than the one Bruce could provide him with.

Little did he know... _little_ could he see the seeds of madness planted in the boy's heart. The capricious cruelty born and imprisoned in the innocent flesh. The _darkness._

He should have seen it. Should have seen it sooner. 

Should have known what Damian Wayne was capable of.

* * *

"Master Bruce."

That was the last word Bruce remembered of Alfred. The last sentence of a man's life song. A faithful servant. A friend. A father. So much more. So much, much more. 

"Because you're mine, father," said Damian Wayne with a smile. A knife held in his red grasp, dripping with gore. Bruce's spine had run cold, even before he saw the knife. _Because that smile._ It was the smile of...death. 

"I love you, father," said Damian Wayne. "I love so very much."

It was the last thing Bruce heard before the blood rushed into his ears.

* * *

It is the language of love to be spoken in sacrifice. 

When God loved Abraham, he demanded sacrifice. 

When Talia al Ghul found love, she demanded a sacrifice. 

When it was refused her, she gave birth to vengeance and fury.

Let her father think what he will, Damian was _hers._

Her revenge on her beloved.

And the boy performed admirably. _For you. Mother._

Then the boy waited. Surely his mother would come. She _would_ come to collect him. After all, his duty was done.

He waits. Patiently. He strides around the room, rough hewn with stone, not a window in sight, only an iron grate in the low ceiling for ventilation. The room oppresses the boy, who is used to the stars for company. He would give anything now to see silver uncaring face of moon-coin again, the thousand tiny blinking eyes. He would give his life, his soul, his breath, to see the planes of his mother's stern yet graceful face. To hear her soft, edgy laugh.

Of his father he thinks only sparingly. He is a fly on the wall, a moth on the doorstep. The man who paces around breathless, sometimes day sometimes night (Damian hears). The man who looked at him with such _hatred,_ such coldly lit _fire,_ the dark eyes soulless with pleading, with begging, please, please, Alfred please, say something, _say_ something, please, _please..._ and then the low keening sound, like a child dying, which had emanated from his lips...Damian was sure he was dying.

He had been dragged away and locked in the cold, damp cellar. The man had stood outside. He had turned in the lock. And, in a voice like a cupboard of iron, said.

"Listen to me, oh Death. 

"You will stay here for the rest of your life."


	8. Chapter 8

It was Damian's madness that had driven Bruce out of the house.

His house had become a mausoleum. It stank of shrinking grief and livid shame. What was it Wilde had said? Losing one parent is a tragedy, but two is carelessness.

Then what about three?

Alfred shrank like a dead stone into Bruce's heart, retreating into it forever. Bruce had no voice left to scream with. There was a hollow in his chest where his heart had been plucked out with forceps. This was his life, his mien. Bruce Wayne. High school teacher. Every night, he came to a snoring house, and to the bellowing boy in the stone cellar, the boy bellowing for his mother. The mother who was coming for him, any second now. 

Seconds became years. And Damian still bellowed, but did his voice get weaker? Did cracks start appearing in his very shape, his skin? Did his heart ever think--ever stop to miss a beat?

Did he ever wonder--ever doubt?

Did his father's voice above get stronger with the force of years and time and stone will? Did he pick up his days like his dirty underwear, from the floor, and toss them into the washer? Did he become an automaton, with no will but his own, no strength but the one being bleached from his bones?

Maybe.

But then, the automaton met a boy.

A boy with pink hair. 

And some piece fell into place, somewhere in the universe. 

* * *

Summer school. Not because it was needed, but because...

Because.

Because they were a family. Although all three of them knew it. The boys sit to attention, mocking salutes whenever Bruce turns to the blackboard to chalk something. 

Well, just Dick and Jason. Tim is the model student who everyone knows something is wrong with.

Bruce is taking a little pre-grade chemistry. The boys are sore tired. He senses this, feels it on the back of his neck. 

And so, he rubs the board off. He puts down the chalk. Gets comfortable in the low, black seat, facing his class. Dick and Jason have been demoted to the second row of the class, for making paper airplanes. They rub their chins together, their eyes are so close, not even bothering to hide their occupation. Bruce starts talking.

He has realized from experience that the only way to make them pay attention is opening up. 

Sometimes painfully. 

Whatever is on the top layer of his mind. 

So he starts.

"I once had a dream.

"It was white and full and everything holy. My shrine, where all my good dreams go. Where all my dreams go now."

And he starts telling them. What it is, even he doesn't know. All he knows is...what it feels like.

And they drink in the words. And their ears are ever sharpened, even if their eyes are ever dull. Bruce sees Dick's voice swallow throat, Jason's eye skittishly fleeing around the room, like a young foal.

His dream is not something young, something stupid, full of darkness. It is light, and energy, and hopelessness, and need, and demand.

As he speaks, Tim's eyes grow ever shinier. They seem to grow and grow, like black magic leaves. Feeding on the need in Bruce's voice, the terror, the helplessness.

The joy.

As he nears the end, even he doesn't know of what, it is like reaching the end of a dream. Like putting one's foot solidly on the ground, and bidding goodbye to the sky.

His son's eyes swim out, meeting near the surface, but just under.

He ends with one last word. Something like a hope, maybe. Something he may be able to inject.

"Build a palace in your mind, and you will never need anyone to pluck out your dreams."

And just like that, the spell is broken.

Jason yawns. Dick fiddles with his pencil. They look suspiciously close to snickering. 

"You! Back benchers!" Bruce calls, somewhat facetiously. Dick and Jason both hoot in response. 

"Look at Tim," Bruce extemporizes. "Why can't you be like _him_?"

Tim is sitting in the front seat, back leather-straight, pen gripped like a vise, an expression of the most intense concentration in his eyebrows. He looks like an exaggerated copy of himself.

They snicker some more. Tim's back gets straighter. But even his eyebrows have started shaking silently.

"So, uh, teach? When do we skip the personality development and get to the _real_ good stuff?" Jason asks, rubbing his palms. "Like, bomb-making-level stuff."

Bruce frowns. Beneath Jason's brash exterior of chilly humor, there is a boy under there who _really_ wants to learn how to make bombs. And Bruce already has one psycho under his roof. Admittedly, this isn't his roof, but still. Such tendencies are to be rooted out, not laughed away. He is just grateful he can be the kind of teacher Jason is comfortable making that joke with. 

Firmly congratulating himself, Bruce tries a small frown. "Jason. I will not be teaching you how to make explosives, as I am sure you must have surmised by now. However, if you excel in analytical chemistry--who knows? I will hardly be policing you for the rest of your life."

Jason visibly perks up, although Dick is meeting this with a slight frown. Bruce winks at him when Jason is bending for his textbooks. _This is how you speak a slum rats' language. Work in a boring lab coat, and do everything you've wanted to do your entire life. Including blowing stuff up,_ says the wink. Dick raises his eyebrows. Bruce is not at all sure that is mock horror in his eyes.

"I want to sleep." says Tim, staring straight ahead. Everyone looks at him shocked. Tim hardly speaks. Actually the only thing he's said so far is "Tim".

"Well," say Dick and Jason together, stunned expressions on their faces. 

"Well," says Bruce, and clears his throat. They all look at him.

Three cheery boys, full red-faced health and happiness. Looking at him with the mild exasperation of teenagers with adult authority. 

"Tim says he'd like to sleep," said Jason.

"I heard him," says Bruce.

"Actually, me too," says Dick, suddenly very tired.

"Me three," says Jason. 

"Well, I can hardly teach a dozing class, can I?" says Bruce, secretly relieved they took it up. "Class dismissed."

They troop out of the summer classroom, and the room is immediately less lighted for their absence. 


	9. Chapter 9

As the night beats on, and his sons (they're his, no matter what the world says) start leaving for their respective slum-trailer-mansion, the school chirps with empty silence. _Ghost town_. Bruce is ready to go too. But something stops him.

Not tonight. 

He thinks about the gnashing fangs banging against his basement grate, the boy with the hungry eyes and the grovelling teeth, and it's like he's dragging his heart behind him. The Manor is waiting for him, syrupy sheets pouring from the mantelpieces and pianofortes, all ghost and dim and darkness, and he feels a dead heaviness in his heart.

His life is a gothic novel. 

"Wait!" he calls. Dick in his rustling wheelchair, Jason in his backpack, Tim lunging to keep up with them. Three slender forms, the shape his angels have taken.

Bruce runs up to them, a light jog. 

"Do any of you have families?" he asks. 

This would be a deeply gauche question, to some. But they look unfazed. With Bruce, you get used to the lumberingness, the persistent almost-but-not-quite social dysfunction. 

He knows they don't. Which dad, which careful sister, send a young boy, not to mention three, out at midnight for summer school? These boys have nowhere to be, and it's really all Bruce's fault. He could've...should've... _done_ something. Anything but isolate them further. Encouraged them to join clubs, sports, the stuff normal kids do. _What is it that normal kids do?_ Bruce doesn't even know. Video games? Hotdogs? Whatever. 

_Normal_ stuff.

Not hanging out with a sorta-middle-aged-at-heart schoolteacher with a bad salary and worse social life. 

They look at each other, each one of them showing a different face. Bruce feels like an idiot. A clumsy-footed yeti stepping into the frozen ice lake of Dick's eyes and Jason's soul. Tim as usual looks unfazed.

"I'm sorry," he apologizes quietly. "I don't either."

"So what, man? Now we're supposed to feel sorry for you? Rich asshole," murmurs Jason. He slaps his thighs. The air is humming. 

Dick's chin-tilt seems to concur with Jason.

"I'll have you know," says Bruce, with the heat rising to his cheeks, "that I may be rich, and I may be an asshole, but I'm not starting a sorry-for-you club. We're not going to sit around and cry. I just..."

Dick sits back in his wheelchair, holding his hands up. "It's okay, Bruce. We know who the real charity case is here."

Bruce looks at him. The high moon is shining on Dick's elbows, which are sticking out just a fraction. He looks...disabled. Lame. Crippled. But Bruce feels sorry-for-you oozing out of every pore of his body. 

_Dick_ is feeling sorry for _him_.

Well that just figures. 

But wait. Maybe...maybe he can use that.

"Here's something else for you." He says quickly, almost like the night would swallow him before he finished his sentence. "I'm afraid to go home. I don't know what it is, waiting for me out there, but it's waiting to crawl into me and eat me up. It's all the swiveling chairs and swinging sheets and it's just...it's not _haunted..."_ he says quickly at Tim's incredulous fish look and Jason's rich-people-for-you sneer. "It's...lonely, I guess is the word for it. Although that word doesn't do it justice, to be sure. I guess what I'm trying to say is..."

"...that you camp out here?" Tim finishes for him, rusty voice slipping out of disused windpipes. 

"Yes," admits Bruce sheepishly. The three boys try to collect what Bruce has let out of the bag.

"So you're saying you're homeless?" Jason asks, not sure if he's heard what he's meant to hear.

"Tt." Dick makes a wry moue. "The correct term for it would be _re-si-dentially cha-llenged_."

"I'm not homeless, thank you very much," Bruce says with dignity. But then he looks at Jason's slept-in sweatshirt, his long-limbs dangling loose in pants too holey and too big, not for the first time wondering if and when Jason's last time in a bed was.

"You sleep in the school," says Tim.

"In the basement. Most nights." Bruce says, adding shyly, "there's blankets for you three."

They lurch all of a sudden, like standing on a boat that has just stopped rocking. They come to a halt. Their faces look exhausted. 

"How would you like to spend the night?" Bruce asks, finally.

* * *

The bomb bunker is basically a gigantic horizontal cylinder in the ground. It has clean stone walls, and reminds Bruce inadvertently of his other stone bunker in a wall, with the boy screaming for help...

They roll up all cozy like. There probably should be more questioning this, but there isn't.

Jason, the poor boy, falls asleep immediately in a ball, cuddled up like a mouse. Bruce tucks him in, and settles down himself with a reading light.

Dick tries several different positions. Two of them involve handstands. Bruce watches with some curiosity. Finally Dick settles down in a nice corner with his back to the wall and his face buried between two pillows. The hollow brickwork of the ceiling had been scoured for rats and earthworms, Bruce had told them. But he still feels a little...woozy.

Tim lies down last. Bruce offers him his own pillow, which Tim accepts. Then he crawls closer, and closer...

Bruce concentrates on determinedly trying to read. Everything is right for fifteen solid, peaceful minutes.

Then... _Tim._ He starts talking, voice like whooshing orange leaves. He starts and stops. Something about something. A crossword clue. A new puzzle. A ball game.

"Do you remember," he pipes up, and funny how once he he's started yapping he can't seem to stop it, even though the rustling midnight feathers and impatient blanket tosses have told him enough. But his wind is a bagpipe, and he can't stop blowing. 

"What?" says Bruce, balmy, turning over another page of his midnight book. His reading-glasses are on, and a light coating of fur is matted on his face in the shadow of his lamp.

Tim rolls back on his stomach, stretching out his wayward tree limbs. His mother had always told him he wasn't growing properly, he needed to eat more. Back when she...bothered with anything. 

Bruce bothers. But not too much.

That is nice.

He doesn't care if Tim grows up "Big and Strong". He cares only as much as Tim cares. 

Tim looks up at the hole in the ceiling, where all the cobwebs and fireflies are. His eyelids have started drifting closer. Maybe there are no fireflies. Maybe there are no cobwebs. This reminds him of the Overlook, the heater room. Or something.

"What," asks Bruce again.

"What Roquentin says? Something about...obscene..." his eyes are swimming shut, his voice a burble in his own ear. He feels soft and coddled and milky. Like his first day on earth.

"Obscene superfluity," says Bruce softly.

" _Thaaat's_ the one," says Tim, rolling onto his side, his elbow under his head, other hand sandwiched between knees. A cool underdraft runs through his pleasantly shivering body, but he doesn't take a blanket. He notices Bruce doesn't tell him either, despite noticing the shiver. He smiles.

"Can you read it?"

"Yes," says Bruce, approaching closer and-- _oh_. Tucking his blanket back onto his shoulders, down and gauze cocooning him in supple quagginess. Betrayal. It tastes warm and squelchy. 

"We are a heap of living creatures," Bruce starts, settling back, like a hollow wind in a cave. "...Irritated, embarrassed at ourselves. We haven't the slightest reason to be there, each one of us confused, vaguely alarmed..."

Tim sighs, settling into his wet down pillow.

"Feels de trop...and I, soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts, I too am de trop. Even my death will de trop. De trop my corpse, my blood on these stones.."

Here Tim begins a mellow, climbing, all-consuming, full-bodied snore, completely out of proportion to his frame and bearing and who-he-is.

Bruce continues, his voice soothing him.

"...between these plants, at the back of the smiling garden And the decomposed flesh will be de trop on the earth which will receive my bones, at last clean, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it will be de trop..." his voice sends out ripples into the shade. "I am de trop for eternity." 

He closes the light.

"De trop," breathes a voice from Dick's body blanket bag, wide-surprise-awake.

"Funny. I feel very... _trop_."

And it turns over like a swiss roll and goes to sleep.

And despite all the _vacantness_ and the _gloamingness_ and the _de tropness_ of the starless universal basement, Bruce smiles. 


	10. Chapter 10

A chain rattles. A door closes. Heavy footsteps approach.

A light under the staircase comes on, and boots make contact with the firm stone slabs of the staircase that winds down into the cellar. Damian scampers away from the door like a rat and goes to stand in the darkness. He brushes his heavy clumps of ragged hair out of his eyes, and wipes his streaked cheeks. He is not going to give the man--his father-- the satisfaction of seeing his suffering. Give him another excuse to gloat.

Not that he ever gloats. His eyes are dim whenever he comes down, and apart from the one hand holding the loaded shotgun, he shows no other recognition for the danger that Damian poses. He feeds Damian pastas, broths, curries, meatballs, steaks, soups. Whatever Damian wants. Or whatever he thinks a boy Damian's age is _supposed_ to want, since Damian never tells him anything. He tried asking once or twice. Damian simply turned and stared at the wall, unhearing, uncaring, unseeing.

So he started bringing down whatever _he_ was eating. It's all the same to Damian. The tastes all sit flat in his mouth. 

Bruce once tried to bring down a comb and a mirror. 

That day, when Damian caught his hideous reflection, Bruce had been reminded why he had put the boy--the _demon_ \-- away. Damian had gnashed his teeth and stood up on his toes and then launched himself full tilt at Bruce, his nails all extended, and it was all Bruce could do not to shoot him, not to shoot the boy, not to shoot his own _son_. Damian had ripped the mirror apart to splinters, and Bruce had beat a strategic retreat. 

Coming later, he had heard sobs wracking a young, piteous body, a small boy, no older than eight, tearing himself apart.

Was it that day, was that the _first_ day, that the smallest droplets of pity sprang up in his heart?

He can't tell. 

* * *

Bruce carries his home into his house. 

This is _my_ house.

_Mine._

And so maybe the portraits still accuse him with staring eyes. And maybe the furniture is old and dusty, and maybe he still doesn't have the heart to throw anything out. Or touch anything. Or move so much as a dust mite. 

But it's still his home.

"One step at a time," advised Tim. 

It isn't the chandelier sparkling with wide-eyed innocence: _Who, me?_ It isn't the butterscotch drapes hanging in the still air. It isn't the nauseating taste of remorse. 

It's a life passed by in vain. Bruce cannot bear to see the signs of what Alfred would have done. What he should have done. What he didn't do. What Alfred would see, would say. If he were there.

Alfred. Clicking his heels together at the front door, that first day he had come home. Alfred, the housekeeper, the silver polisher. Alfred.

The boys enter, hushed. They look around at the great silken draperies of cobwebs, at the old polished oaken cabinets laden with quiet crystal, at the slow sunlight freezing through the air, making tiny dancing particles. They moves through the great house silently, tiptoeing with a whisper. 

"Why are we here?" asks Dick, at Bruce's elbow.

Jason sneezes. The echo rounds the house like a spear, flying through all the remaining shards of stillness. The brown master staircase fades out in front of Bruce into golden mist. It rises out in front of him like a spire, happy, noisy, joyful. Alive with pattering feet, boisterous catcalls, shrill yells, all cacophony, but it still sounded like summer music to Bruce's ears, and above all of them, a loud, completely ignored stentorian _Kids! Class. Now!_

And Bruce didn't need to see the origin of the voice to know it was his own.

Tim runs up the staircase, two steps at a time and Jason follows, never to be outdone, while Dick looks on wisfully. Bruce still doesn't have it in him to ascend. The courage of youth. From upstairs calls of mine! This one's mine, Hey where's Dickie? Leave that for him! emerge. Dick elbows his waist. 

"Please carry me up, mister, wouldjya?"

And Bruce has no choice but to obey. He hoists Dick over his shoulder and carries up the folded wheelchair in the other hand. "We'll make this handicap accessible, of course," he says as he climbs, one careful step at a time. Dick's warm breath tickles his shoulder blades.

"Thanks." Dick says. "For everything."

And Bruce doesn't find the words, can't find the words to say _no,_ _thank_ you _, I don't know what I'd be doing without_ you _guys, you made this my home, without you I'd still be sleeping in a particularly oppressive school basement and keeping my son locked up in a cellar..._

So he just clears his throat. "It's...fine." He puts Dick down carefully on the ground, then unfolds the soft cambric of the wheelchair seat and picking up and easing Dick into it. Dick looks up into his eyes.

"No." He looks into Bruce's eyes keenly, as always with a finger on Bruce's pulse. Bruce, in the moment, feels utterly, ruthlessly, transparent. "I meant thank you for doing this for yourself. Finding this in yourself. The courage. Or whatever."

Bruce raises his hand and rubs the back of his head. "Is that a... _compliment_?" He looks shocked. 

"Kinda." Dick says, twisting his mouth up into the characteristic Dick-esque smirky rueful. "Don't let it get to your head."

"Sure thing, Dad."

Dick laughs. It's a full laugh, dark head thrown back, neck exposed. Bruce is reminded of the open-mouthed, infectious boy that early day in the classroom. The one nobody could figure or understand, because his cheerfulness was positively unearthly. Because he reminded them they had no excuse to complain. Because he made them feel ashamed. 

"Now show me to my room, _Dad_." He rolls forward, whistling. Bruce almost starts. But Dick so ultra-casual about it, Bruce smiles.

Dick opens a door into a cozy rectangular olive green room, with high rafters. He lets out a breath. _Perfect_ , he mutters. Then Tim springs out of a corner on the right and shuts the door with a foul curse. 

"Mine!" he bellows from inside. Dick looks a little hurt and not a little offended. Bruce doesn't say anything. He can't afford to be seen as taking sides so early on.

"It's okay Dick." He says. "Every room is something special here. Don't make up your mind so fast."

But Dick stills looks chagrined. Bruce moves on. The second story, his old east wing. Where old memories and emotions had conglomerated into jaded things. He stops outside his parents' memorial bedroom. The heart of the house. 

He pulls a deep breath into his lungs with the full force of his body. He's going to need it.

Then he reaches for the gold handle and turns it. It squeaks. The door peers open.

The smell of musty oak and irises swim into his nostrils. He peeps through the gap. 

It's just as he remembers it.

He closes it.

"There better not be any surprises in the attic!" Jason bellows from the top of the house, bending over the marble railing. "I mean swear, if there's a mad wife in here or summin' I swear to you I'm runnin _awaaay,"_ Bruce hears him fiddling with the giant iron clamp of the greenhouse where he'd moved Damian for sunlight. 

"Don't!"

And then there's a scream.


End file.
